Hospital Price Transparency MRF Lint

Lints a hospital standard charges machine-readable file (the CMS JSON template) against 45 CFR Part 180 before you publish it to your website. It runs offline, inside the editor, on the file you already have open. Nothing is uploaded.

Hub: https://getreadystack.com/tools/hospital-mrf-lint

Who this is for

US hospital revenue-cycle engineers, chargemaster analysts and the contractors who generate the standard charges file out of Epic, Cerner, Meditech or a home-grown export. You are the person who has to answer when CMS emails the hospital about the file.

What it checks

15 rules, all offline, each one carrying the paragraph it comes from:

• the six required top-level fields (hospital_name, last_updated_on, version, hospital_location, hospital_address, license_information) and the licensing state
• version names a real CMS template version (2.0.0, 2.1.0, 2.2.0)
• last_updated_on is YYYY-MM-DD, and is not stale: 45 CFR 180.50(d)(2) wants an update at least every 365 days, and the linter counts the days against today's date
• the affirmation block exists and confirm_affirmation is the boolean true, not the string
• every item has a plain-language description and at least one code with a CMS-listed code type
• setting is inpatient, outpatient or both
• gross charge and discounted cash price are present for every item
• a rate published as a percentage or an algorithm also carries an estimated_amount in dollars
• the methodology is one of the five CMS values, and other carries additional_payer_notes
• dollar amounts are JSON numbers, not strings
• placeholder prices (0, 9999999, N/A, call for price) are caught as placeholders
• drug items carry both a unit and a type of measurement

Try it on the samples

_fixtures/clean.json returns 0 findings. _fixtures/dirty.json returns 17 findings, 15 of them errors, including a last_updated_on that is 580 days old against the 365-day update duty in 45 CFR 180.50(d)(2), a setting of OP, a gross_charge published as a string and a negotiated percentage with no estimated_amount.

Why a generic JSON validator does not do this

A JSON formatter tells you the braces balance. The CMS template is a shape with conditional duties: estimated_amount is required only when the rate is a percentage or an algorithm, additional_payer_notes only when the methodology is other, and the file is late only relative to today. A chat assistant guesses field names from an older template version and cannot count the days since your last publish.

What it costs to get this wrong

Under 45 CFR 180.90 CMS can impose a civil monetary penalty of 10 dollars per bed per day, capped at 5500 dollars a day and 2007500 dollars a year for one hospital. A 250-bed hospital sits at 2500 dollars a day while the file is non-compliant.

A hospital price-transparency review by a revenue-integrity consultancy is commonly quoted as a five-figure engagement; this extension is 29 dollars once.

Free and full

Free, with no key: open a standard charges JSON file, run Hospital MRF Lint: Check this file, and every one of the 15 rules reports with a line number. That is the whole check for one file.

The full version adds the other axis - scale and the paper trail: sweep every hospital location file in the workspace in one pass and export one dated evidence report you keep for the file, with the finding counts per location and the rule text beside each one. 29 dollars once, one licence key per person or CI seat.

Commands

• Hospital MRF Lint: Check this file - lint the open JSON file
• Hospital MRF Lint: Sweep the workspace - every location file at once (full version)
• Hospital MRF Lint: Write the evidence report - dated Markdown report (full version)

Licence

See LICENSE.txt. The rule text quotes 45 CFR Part 180 and the CMS machine-readable file template data dictionary; it is not legal advice.